Speculum virginum
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Book Series
Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 100-100A
- Pages: 342 p.
- Size:155 x 245 mm
- Language(s):Latin, French
- Publication Year:1997
- € 240,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-04001-1
- Hardback
- Available
BIO
Rabanus Maurus was one of the most prolific writers of the Carolingian Renaissance. His works include Biblical commentaries, homilies, theological treatises, pedagogical writings such as De institutione clericorum, and the encyclopedic De rerum naturis. He also composed Latin poetry and greatly influenced medieval education and scholarship, earning him the title "Praeceptor Germaniae".
Born in Mainz around 780, Rabanus entered the Benedictine monastery at Fulda, where he was educated and ordained a deacon in 801. In 802 he was sent to Tours to study under Alcuin, who in recognition of his scholarly qualities, gave him the epithet "Maurus", after the first disciple of St. Benedict.
Upon his return to Fulda in 803, Rabanus became the head‑master of the monastic school, which under his leadership grew into one of the most important centers of learning in Europe. He was ordained a priest in 814, and in 822 he was elected abbot of Fulda. After resigning the abbacy in 842 to devote himself to study and prayer, he spent a period in retirement at Petersberg. In 847, Rabanus was appointed archbishop of Mainz, a position he held until his death in 856.
Summary
Rabanus Maurus (780-856), a monk and then abbot of Fulda, ended his career as archbishop of Mainz. Perhaps the most famous of his numerous works, the In honorem sanctae crucis (dated 810), better known traditionally since the Renaissance as De laudibus sanctae crucis, consists of a remarkable series of 28 carmina figurata glorifying the holy cross. Rabanus thus followed the Constantinian poet Porphyrius Optatianus, and also, but more discretely, some poems composed on this theme by Venantius Fortunatus. But from the outset he went further than his predecessors. Indeed, he did not compose a few isolated poems but a unified cycle. And the degree of complexity achieved by Rabanus in the tangle of versus intexti, of drawings, of each poem taken as a whole constitutes a kind of record for the genre that the Middle Ages did not surpass.
The proposed edition follows the editio princeps of Jacques Wimpfeling (Pforzheim, 1503), the other editions (1605, 1627, and finally the Patrologia Latina) having been printed without recourse to the manuscripts. It consists of an introduction, the critical Latin text with the apparatus taking account of all of the ninth-century manuscripts, and various annexes, which enable this difficult text to be read with the least inconvenience possible. There is a new French translation of the carmina figurata, explanatory notes of the carmina figurata and of their parallels, and several indices. There is a colour reproduction of the carmina figurata as found in the Vatican manuscript, Reginensis 124.
